At our house, we decorate for various seasons, and for holidays. The degree of decoration depends on various factors, such as the holiday and or season.

Post-new-year winter decorations consist of two door wreaths and two urns with faux winter foliage. Easter sometimes gets egg wreaths or spring foliage wreaths and urns with spring foliage. Summer is slightly more festive, except for the Fourth of July when we put red, white, and blue bunting across the deck railing that extends the length of the rear deck, and patriotic décor on the dining room table.

But when autumn comes the decorations get more serious, with not only door wreaths and harvest urns, but also lots of faux pumpkins on the front porch, a harvest display around the fireplace, and an elaborate dining room display that starts harvest/Halloween and then becomes Harvest/Thanksgiving.

The grand finale is Christmas, with front porch displays, lighted lawn decorations, and roof-line lights, and lights and garlands on the deck, not to mention a mantel display of lights and miniature carolers and white deer, with stockings beneath, an elaborate Christmas tree, as well as rotating décor and decorations from my wife the professor’s some sixty plus boxes of Christmas “stuff” gathered over more than forty years.

EXCEPT… this year, we have no family coming, and we’ve both just recovered from Covid [despite two shots and three boosters each], and we decided to downsize for Christmas, with just the Christmas tree, smaller mantel display, a few more outside wreaths, and miniature lighted evergreens along the front walk… and just one lighted brand-new lawn ornament – a cheerful dog wearing a Santa hat and pouncing on a red-and-green wrapped Christmas present.

I set up the dog a little over two weeks ago, pounding the stakes anchoring the base into the frozen ground. He looked very cheerful. Three days later, we got unforecast winds of sixty miles per hour that ripped half the base of the dog ornament out of the ground and snapped one not very securely welded support, with the result that the dog was sideways on the lawn. Before I could resuscitate the collapsed canine, we got four inches of snow.

When the weather cleared some, I got out heavy wire and reassembled the pooch, and gathered roughly fifty pounds of small boulders to anchor the base and supplement the replaced stakes. He lasted about a week before we got more winds, merely gusts of fifty miles per hour, but those were sufficient to decapitate the poor beleaguered canine and snap another under-engineered metal support, and again topple the dog, before dropping another five inches of snow and temperatures twenty degrees below freezing over the partly disassembled canine.

So I got heavier wire and reassembled and reinforced him, added a few small boulders to those supporting his base, only to discover that the forecast has changed and we’re likely facing more wind, even lower temperatures, and likely more snow.

So much for a lower effort, downsized Christmas with only one lawn ornament.